Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

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Your whole premise is false: keeping and bearing arms is much safer than driving cars. I can go into details as to why I believe that's the case, but to start with, whenever I walk outside the door I put my carry gun into a holster, and then never take it out until I return home. So it's just sitting there on my hip under my shirt or vest, not much of a danger to anyone as long as I keep it away from an MRI machine's strong magnet.

But the raw facts speak for themselves; off the top of my head, the latest available numbers are 33,000 or so vehicle accident fatalities per year, 600 with guns.

Lots more car owners accidently kill than gun owners, and as I've mentioned elsewhere, the proper analogy to a drivers license is a concealed carry licence, and I'd add for hunting a hunting licence, which nowadays requires proof of taking a hunter's safety course (unless you're an old guy like me and are grandfathered).

As far as "convincing" "the rest of us", we simply don't have to do that any more than I have to convince you that I can use a printing press without prior restraint, its an enumerated Constitutional right. Want to change that? The Constitution has a mechanism.

Quoting the number of gun accidents is misleading. The point of a license is to keep dangerous equipment out of the hands of people who are a danger to others or themselves. Thus you should really count murder/suicide too, and as wikipedia says, "In 2010, there were 19,392 firearm-related suicide deaths, and 11,078 firearm-related homicide deaths in the United States". So guns really are at least as dangerous as cars, probably moreso since only 1/3 of households own guns.

Since of course we know that gun ownership/access and suicide are closely correlated, and nearly gun free societies like Japan and China don't have suicide rates nearly twice ours....

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra...)

And what about considering the opposite end of the stick, e.g. that firearms are used 2.25 million times per year in self-defense (which I figured some time ago was about twice as many times as they are used in criminal offense).

Above the united states in that rank (and by a LOT) is most of Europe. France, Belgium, Austria, most of Eastern Europe (and the Netherlands if you were to add "self" chosen euthanasia to suicide figures, bringing it up to over 20. Self between brackets since it's often not a choice, as medical treatments are stopped for elderly people in Holland, making euthanasia the only treatment that can offer hope to alleviate pain)

There's also Japan, just in the top10, which was claimed to have a lower suicide rate than the US because of lack of guns, in fact has a suicide rate just short of twice that of the US.

Incidentally, all muslim nations are reporting suicide rates that I just can't believe are accurate, or they're just not present at all. I know multiple stories about suicide from people in Kuwait, and I've never been (just work with consultants that have been there). Presumably they only report suicides amongst Kuwaiti, not the 80% immigrant population, and even then it seems on the low side.

There's reasons for suicide, but merely having an easy means to do it (guns) doesn't factor in at all. Looking at that list, clearly the cold is the main factor, with a close second bad economic conditions, and then we move on to lack of freedom. I wonder if you were to check suicide rates in parts of the US if this pattern would hold. Most in the poor northern states ?

Yep: http://www.suicide.org/suicide-statistics.html#death-rates (not sure if it's a good reference)

Alaska comes out on top, with only New Mexico as a southern state in the top-5.

So here's the theory from those statistics. 1) cold (maybe lack of sunlight ?) is a big cause of suicide 2) barring that, bad economic conditions 3) after that, bad government will do it

Being from The Netherlands myself, this is simply not true. Euthanasia is something that both the patient (and if the patient is no longer capable of deciding for himself, his family) and the doctor have to agree on.

Stopping treatment or prescribing drugs that will shorten the patient's life is also being done in the US, so if you want to inflate the suicide numbers, you have to do it for all.

How can a patient -aside from a coma- EVER be incapable of deciding for himself ? Yet most often family decides ... For family, what you neglect to mention is that say "no, don't euthanize" often has a very high (monthly) cost (for the home + treatment), whereas euthanasia is free. And what happens when they say no, but don't pay ? All treatment, including very basic treatment like dialysis is stopped, leading to painful deaths.

Don't they have health insurance ? Well, yes, but the Dutch government unilaterally changed the terms of national health insurance to no longer cover any treatment that isn't likely to "significantly" extend life, on average, and measured in percentage (and not for a particular patient). Of course significantly extending life is measured as a percentage, and if you're 80 ... Basic cheap treatment like dialysis is stopped at ~69 years old. And while it is true that it's unlikely to extend a patient's life by 10% from that point, stopping that treatment will be fatal in ~48 hours in some cases, and it'll be a painful death.

> but merely having an easy means to do it (guns) doesn't factor in at all.

The research on this is very good and very clear. Access to effective means of suicide increases rates of completed suicide. Guns are very effective means of suicide, thus access to guns increases rates of completed suicide.

You're making a mistake to compare rates of suicide among different nations. That's tricky because of the different ways suicide is reported (or not reported), but it's also not relevant.

What we really want to know is what the rate of completed suicide would be in the US with guns available and with guns not available.

Once you have that information you then decide whether it's significant enough to warrant restricting guns.

I'm trying to ignore my own strong anti-gun sentiment. My kneejerk reaction is to say "ban all guns!". My considered response is something like "increase availability of mental health treatment! Provide rapid access to crisis and home treatment options! destigmatize mental illness! Persuade men to get treatment for illness, especially mental illness! Start a discussion in the gun owning community about locking guns up, and about getting treatment for mental illness".

Your comments about treatment of elderly people in the Netherlands feels odd. Please, do you have a cite for that?

I think you might be arguing against something that I didn't actually say.

The operative words in "concealed carry license" and "hunting license" is "license", which was exactly my point.

The number of printing press deaths in the US, and likely worldwide is probably quite small.

A "hunting license" gives you the ability to take an animal, not to own a firearm.

And in most states (outside of the most infringing states -- my home state of NY is a great example), a Conceal Carry license is "how" you can carry a handgun on your person - and not the ability to own one.

A hunting license also gives you the ability to carry a loaded long gun in a variety of places it is otherwise illegal, due mostly to anti-poaching laws.

Now that I was unaware of. Thanks for informing me!

I had my hunting license early, so I really take it for granted.

You seem to have not noticed how printing presses, and newfangled movie projectors and radio transmitters, were instrumental in arranging the deaths of a quarter billion disarmed people by their own governments in the 20th century. You simply can't achieve that level of mass murder if you're limited to getting up on a soap box, word of mouth, etc.

Hang on, you're now arguing the rather vague second amendment is inviolable but the first caused Hitler? Come on.

Let's not be silly. Note how many of the top items on this list predate movies and radio:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_...

The An Lushan Rebellion, for example, is thought to have possibly killed 15% of the human population of the entire planet. Hitler and Stalin couldn't dream of such levels of mass murder.

While your stats are true, people typically aren't aiming their car at someone.

People typically aren't aiming their guns at someone, either.

The statistics he listed were also for accidental deaths, in both cases.

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